Honor 6X Review: Dual Camera Rockstar, Swagger way!

In this article, let us review the Honor 6X, a mid range smartphone from Huawei which just got launched today in India. Although this device is priced like a budget phone, the features, design and the user experience give it a feel of a premium mid-range smartphone.

Honor is Huawei’s Smartphone e-brand for digital natives. Honor has been expanding aggressively in global markets, and has successfully launched in 74 global markets, entering the bestselling charts in most of the European countries honor launched.

The Honor 6X will be available at INR 12999 in three colours – gold, silver and grey. The phone will be available online exclusively on amazon.in. The sale of Honor 6X will commence later this week.

Hardware, Look and Feel:

The Honor 6X comes with a premium aircraft grade metal that also offers great level of heat sinks. The top and bottom of the phone are made up of plastic, but still the phone doesn’t look cheap at all.

The phone is neither heavy, nor very light. Its a good weight in the hands; and doesn’t slip-off easily. Although this phone looks a little big, it is very comfortable to hold them.The curved edges is quite ergonomic and the rear flows very well to the 2.5D glass in the front. There is a LED notification on the top of the phone as well.

The power button and volume rockers are placed on the right side which feels vey neat and also offers a good amount of tactile feedback. The buttons also have a textured feel to it making it more comfortable to use. The left side is for the SIM and SD card slots. Its surprising why Honor dropped the 2 separate slots and included the Hybrid SIM slot this time.

The phone is powered with an octacore 64bit Kirin 655 16nm SOC processor clocked at 2.1GHz, Mali-T830MP2, faster EMMC 5.1 and 3/4GB RAM (depends on the variant you choose from). The phone has a onboard 32GB ROM for the 3GB variant and 64GB for the 4GB variant. The phone has support for expandable storage upto 128 GB.

The Emotion UI makes the OS much user friendly and optimises the OS with a good RAM management. The OS also provides some good tweaks that help in better performance when compared to other phones in this segment.

The rear of the phone sports the camera and the finger print sensor. The finger print sensor is an impressive feature on this phone (or in any Huawei phone in that matter). The finger print reading is fast (the company says 0.3 seconds to unlock) and also, has worked well all the times for me. When compared to other phones in this segment, the accuracy is pretty neat.

The phone has a 3340 mAh battery which offers a good battery life of over a day; It gives me SOT of 7 hours which is pretty impressive. With Emotion UI, there are tons of more customisations which you can do, to make your phone even better in terms of battery saving. Thanks to the patents Huawei has on the same.

The call drops are fairly less. The sound quality on the phone isn’t great when you play music on loud speaker; it gets slightly better with a headset. However, The call quality is very impressive and the volume is good too.!

Camera:

The Dual camera is at a rise now and Huawei has been pioneering there. The dual camera setup is also one of the highlight of this phone.

The rear cameras are powered with a 12-megapixel and 2-megapixel PDAF cameras. The front-facing camera has 8-megapixel. The aperture allows good amount of light; the device also has a single LED flash to use in low-light conditions. In outdoors, the camera performs very well and is quick. The quality of pictures is pretty neat and the details are sharp with colours being good as well.

Thankfully, the software doesn’t over-sharp the images and hence, images feel realistic. Here are some samples pictures I clicked.

Emotion UI also offers a great camera software which gives you options for smart selfies, food mode etc.

Shot with a Good Food Mode

The Honor 6X also offers manual shooting controls (professional mode) for people who like to create photographs. This stands out when compared to the competition like Redmi Note 4.

The follow-focus on the videos is a pretty good addition. The front camera performance is decent and does take some good pictures; and if you’re a selfie lover, there are tons of more options to play around.

Display

The Display is very impressive and sharp. I find it to be one of the real good features of the phone. Its a 5.5 inch, IPS Panel display powering a full HD resolution of 1080 * 1920 offering a 480 dpi. The quality and the details are neat. Images aren’t over-saturated or too warm/cold. the colours are vibrant and the brightness on the screen is impressive as well. Reading text on the phone is pretty good. I like the fact, it isn’t too sharp giving a realistic clear text.

Software, User Experience:

The Honor 6X runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box with the customised version. These days, Every company have their own android skins for their phones. Out of all, my personal favourites have been the Flyme OS, MIUI and Emotion UI. They are not just basic customisations, but give users few features which are actually worth trying.

This phone offer Emotion UI 4.1, the first Honor phone to feature Marshmallow. There are few software features which makes the phone pretty good. My personal favourite is the notifications window. They show a lot more detail on a timeline about the app notifications and your system. Shake to re-align icons is cool as well. Themes would also fancy some people. I love the Health App; that little notification on the lock screen is super cool. This version of EMUI also brings in some performance improvements.

The emotion UI provides you way more options to further make use of the finger print sensor, than to just unlock your phone. Gestures help you do that. For e.g.: Swiping up on the finger print scanner shows the recently used apps. Swiping down brings in the notifications page to quickly read through and toggle settings. A tap can be configured to take you to back screen or even click a picture while you take a selfie. You can even take a call, or use it like a home button with customisations available.

The Wi-fi Bridge is not just a hotspot but a repeater as well. It helps you share your Wi-Fi connection to other devices.

Pros and Cons, Value for Money:

With a metal body, premium design and a good display, the Honor 6X is impressive. The pricing is pretty good and well positioned with the rest of the competition. The Honor 6X offers better user experience than the likes of Coolpad and Vivo. The only competition would be the Redmi Note 4.

I personally love how the honor phones offer a good user experience with its Emotion UI; and of course the accurate finger print scanner which doubles with great gesture controls. I believe, software updates with Honor aren’t going to be an issue either. The Honor 6X will also receive the EMUI 5.0 update Android 7.0 Nougat in Q2 2017.

Summing up, This phone offers a good design, beautiful display and most importantly, finger print scanner which is accurate and does a lot more things than just unlocking your phone. If you love playing around with cameras, you will enjoy this phone.